The Unexpected Spy

by Tracy Walder

  “There’s something, though,” he said. “There’s something you’re hiding. Your test wouldn’t be so inconclusive if you weren’t hiding anything.”

  “I can’t think of anything…” There was the fake ID I had given to my mother on the plane, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning. This was, after all, an organization that operated under fake IDs.

  “Are you sure you haven’t done any drugs?” he asked. “It’s okay if you have. Most people have tried something at least once in college.”

  “I’ve never been interested,” I said.

  “You weren’t even curious about pot?”

  “Nope.” In truth, I had been mildly curious after watching a few girls in the sorority laugh to the point of crying after smoking pot. But I was afraid of the “munchies,” which everyone claimed followed. After so many bullying years when I had been called fat, pillaging a can of Pringles or a bag of Fritos was something I actively avoided. And, at twenty, I was still immersed in the culture and tyranny of thinness that particularly dominated places like sororities, if not all of Southern California, at the time. Still, I loved to eat candy and always had something with me in my purse. That morning, after having skipped the free pastries at the motel, I was hungry. With the wires attached to my body, I reached into my black tote bag and pulled out a box of Hot Tamales, my favorite candy.

  “Hot Tamales?” I held the box out toward the wooden man. He shook his head no, and then watched as I poured some out in my hand and ate them.

  “And no strange sexual encounters?”

  “God, no!” I palmed another handful of Hot Tamales. “Unless you count that really bad kiss from Tommy Greenspan in eleventh grade. His tongue went up my nostril.” I had forgotten about that kiss until my middle-of-the-night ruminations.

  “You never harmed any animals? Cut the whiskers off the family cat?”

  “No. We’re dog people. And I love my dog.”

  We did the test again. It took hours. And then the wooden man gave me one last chance to confess.

  “Tracy,” he said. “There’s something you’re not telling us. You can say it. Just tell me.”

  An image popped in my head. A face. And suddenly I thought I knew what I’d been unconsciously hiding.

  “Okay,” I said. “But please don’t call the police.”

  “Trust me,” the wooden man said.

  “My mother’s cleaning lady, Rosa, is an illegal immigrant.” My eyes blinked hard as I looked into the wooden man’s face. His lips twitched a little. Not a smile, but a tilt up.

  “That really doesn’t concern us.” He stood and left the room.

  I glanced up at the mirrored wall where I assumed a person (if not a team of people) was watching me. And then I shut my eyes and fell quickly and deeply asleep, still wired and upright.

  It was a sleep that eliminated any awareness of time, so I don’t know how long it was before the wooden man returned to the room and woke me.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You passed your polygraph.”

  The final leg of the three days of interviewing was a visit with a psychiatrist. After revealing everything I could possibly dig up from every layer of consciousness for the polygraph test, the psych exam felt minimally invasive.

  * * *

  Sorority sisters are required to return to the house in early August in order to get ready for Rush Week. This is the time when sororities and fraternities recruit new members over five days of parties along with traditional rituals, which for the girls include a lot of singing, cheering, and chanting. I have never been one to shirk my responsibilities, so I participated fully as required. But as someone who doesn’t like to be seen, it was hard to stand on the rolling front lawn and sing to passersby, or to do the more complicated door chant, for which we planned to spend two days rehearsing. Here’s how the door chant works: girls wanting to join Delta Gamma would open the great red door of the spectacular Federal style house and find the doorway filled from top to bottom with smiling, shout-singing faces. When done right, it looks like a cartoon cannibal’s stack of heads. To properly achieve this, sorority sisters stood on ladders, chairs, and each other’s shoulders. I didn’t worry about my safety, but I did always try to find a place where I wouldn’t stand out, where I would be an anonymous head on which no one would focus.

  It was in the middle of this rehearsal week, just before lunch, when some girls started talking about a shooting that had taken place in Los Angeles at a community center. I ran upstairs to the den and put on the news. A few girls filtered into the room; we filled the couches and chairs as we heard about what had unfolded.

  A man named Buford O. Furrow, Jr. (the name alone deserves a paragraph or two, but I’ll ignore it), had driven from Tacoma, Washington, to Los Angeles with the purpose of “killing Jews.” He found that he couldn’t get close to the big institutions, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, but he was able to walk right into the lobby of a Jewish community center in Granada Hills. There, with a submachine gun, he opened fire on a crowd that included many children. Seventy bullet casings were found on the floor. Many people, including three young kids, were shot.

  We were aghast. Horrified. Shootings like these are so common now that it’s hard to remember how shocking they used to be. How they unnerved us deep into our hearts and souls. How we sat around the TV for hours on the rare times these horrors did unfold. And how we thought about the tragedy for more than just a few seconds or an hour. If you were like me, it was just about the only thing you thought about for months.

  In the TV room that afternoon, I had one of the most engaging conversations I’d ever had with my sorority sisters. We talked about anti-Semitism, racism, terrorism, and guns. There was a pulsing in my limbs, and my heart pounded steadily. I could have sat in that room through the night, trying to find ways to work through the muck that was weighing down the country. More than ever, I wanted to be part of the solution to these worldwide and domestic problems, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit this aloud. Other than my roommate and my parents, I had only told the people whose names I’d written down as references that I had applied to the CIA. And I’d asked all of them, four sorority sisters, to not let others know I was applying. It seemed too … outlandish, in a way. And I envisioned people asking themselves, Why does SHE think she could be a spy?

  The conversation escalated, not to an argument, but toward solutions—one person, working off the ideas of another. We were discussing politics now, action, writing to members of Congress, when a redheaded girl named Alicia looked at her watch and screamed, “Oh my god, it’s time to practice the door chant!”

  That was it. We filed out and never picked up the thread again.

  My body was at the door chant rehearsal, while my mind remained at the Jewish community center. Claire, the Rush chair, was frantically trying to get everyone in place so that the doorway wouldn’t have an inch of background light shining through. At our first run-through, the girls at the top of the doorway—perched on ladders—were continually looking down, probably afraid of tumbling and cracking open their heads on the marble landing.

  “Look up!” Claire shouted. “UP! UP! UP!” I wasn’t one of the problem heads, as I had hidden myself behind the group of overflow girls who filled the window beside the door. We were the side act, as the doorway was where all the action was.

  The next day, I was still thinking about the community center—puzzling through the possible ways to deal with domestic terrorism as opposed to forces outside our borders—when it was time for another door chant practice. I went to the entrance hall and stood behind the mass at the window, while other girls teetered on their footstools and ladders. We started the chant. D-E-L-T-A, Delta! D-E-L-T-A, G-A-double-M-A, Gamma!…

  Claire shouted, “LOOK UP!”

  I looked over at the ladder girls to see if they were following Claire’s orders. And then I burst out laughing, just as they did. Taped above the transom window was a Playgirl m
agazine centerfold from the mid-1970s. The model was a man with exuberantly curly hair in every place a male body can have hair. His penis—slung across his thigh like a sleeping lap animal—was enormous. It was a single moment when I momentarily forgot about terrorism in any form.

  Two days later, the guy with the lap penis was still posted above the door when a man from the CIA arrived unannounced. He said he was there to interview the four references I had given on my application, and he hoped they were all home or could be summoned home quickly. My eyes flitted back and forth between the CIA agent and the penis. I willed him not to turn his head to see what I was looking at.

  “Would you like to talk to them in the parlor? Or maybe the library?” I was smiling too big for the moment.

  “No. I need to see your bedroom. I’ll speak to your references there.” He was over six feet tall, older than everyone else I’d met in the agency, and had a military buzz cut. Everything about him was contained, controlled. He even spoke with the minimum number of words.

  “Of course.” I pushed my finger on the buzzer button of the wall-mounted intercom system. Boys, men, weren’t allowed above the first floor in our house. If someone did need to go up there for any reason, it had to be announced.

  “Gentleman caller coming up,” I said into the speaker. Gentleman caller was what any guy was called. Girls were summoned to meet their dates or friends with the words, “There’s a gentleman caller for…”

  I was in jeans and a t-shirt that day, but most girls were in shorts and tank tops or sweatpants—a staple of any college wardrobe. The agent said he’d find his way to my room, and then asked that I stay downstairs while he conducted the interviews. Melissa was in our room doing homework on her bed, so I assumed he’d start by talking to her. I tried to imagine where he might sit. There was no way he’d drop into the beanbag chair, and I couldn’t fathom him on a bed. And how could he fold his stiff, lanky body into the flimsy desk chair?

  While he was upstairs, I nervously waited in the parlor, picking at a loose thread in the hem of my jeans. I hoped that I hadn’t done anything that my sorority sisters would find unbecoming for a spy and a representative of the United States. Would the fact that I hadn’t flung myself enthusiastically into the door chant work against me? And what about the penis? Would the agent see it on his way down the stairs, out the door? My stomach clenched as I waited for those interviews to be over so that I could … well, I wanted to interrogate my friends and find out every word they’d said. But I knew that wasn’t right. I knew I’d have to temper my curiosity.

  The agent left without looking up toward the transom window. Maybe he was excellent at his job and actually had seen the lap penis without letting on that he had. Melissa and my three other friends gave me minimal feedback, though I did hear that he’d sat on the desk chair and they’d sat on the beds. Basically, I was told that they each had confirmed facts I’d given about myself, and then were asked if there was someone else he should interview. In this way, the vetting process was expanded past my sorority all the way to my mother’s friends. When I asked my mother what her friends had said, the only thing she could report was that Pat, her best friend, had offered him coffee in her favorite golden retriever mug. Mom wasn’t sure if he had drunk the coffee or not.

  I knew there was no dirt on me: I’d never stolen anything, smoked anything, or betrayed anyone. But the me who wanted to be in the CIA—the person I was when I lay in bed at night thinking about security checks in Gaza and where a person might hide in Afghanistan—was as closeted as Bruce Jenner before he became she. How could people take me or my desires seriously if I’d never revealed that side of myself to anyone but Mike Smith, the recruiter?

  * * *

  A girl named Tammy was sorting mail into the boxes under the grand staircase of the Delta Gamma house. It was the end of November, and I had just come in from a run and was lingering in the entrance hall waiting to see if there were letters for me.

  “Who the FUCK is getting mail from the CIA?!” Tammy shouted. She looked at the name, then jerked her head toward me with raised eyebrows. In her mind, I was probably the least likely spy in the house.

  I snatched the letter and dashed upstairs to my room.

  The sweat on my legs suctioned against the pink leather as I settled into the beanbag chair. I ripped open the envelope. My stomach tumbled, and I wanted to scream. Instead, I just smiled and bit my lip.

  Tracy Schandler—the floppy baby who had been ridiculed for years, whose Bat Mitzvah party theme was the solar system, who had never left the country without her parents, who was a devoted history major at the University of Southern California, who was vice president of social standards at Delta Gamma—was going to be in the CIA.

  THREE

  THE TURNING POINT

  Langley, Virginia September 11, 2001

  It was 6:45 a.m. when I pulled my silver Acura into the car dealership–sized CIA lot and then cruised through the gaps between cars. The lot would be full in a couple of hours, but I always came in early enough to park only a short hike’s distance from the new CIA building with the pretty blue-green glass windows.

  I’d been listening to Sting’s Brand New Day CD continuously the past few weeks. “Desert Rose” was my favorite song, and I often hit the replay button and listened to that alone for the drive into work. The opening of the song—the music and a plaintive ululating voice—sounded more Middle Eastern than Western. And, of course, the desert I saw in my mind as I belted out the words along with Sting was the Registan in Afghanistan. It was a place that was becoming more familiar to me than the fenced front yard of the house I grew up in.

  For the past year I’d been in the mapping department, reading satellite images sent mostly from the Middle East. At my desk, in my cubicle on the second floor, I’d stare at the screen with the geolocators typed in white on the lower-right corner, and then write out what I was seeing. It was like I’d learned to read another language; or maybe I was more like a radiologist looking at a sonogram and seeing a full-fledged baby where everyone else only saw Rorschach blots. You could throw any photo my way, and within 30 seconds I could tell you from only the fuzzy shape of a head who was standing there and what he was standing next to. Closing my eyes at night, yearning desperately for a couple hours of sleep, I would see the highlighted, craggy wedges of mountains, the shadowy gray nooks of rocky crevices, caves, valleys. And the square and rectangular outlines of seemingly lonely outposts—safe houses, warehouses, factories, and training camps where unbeknownst to most of America, al-Qaeda was rapidly building its forces. I’d assembled binder after binder filled with images and information about all the known terrorists, their locations, and their activities.

  And then, a week ago, I’d been approved for a higher security clearance, as I’d been moved into what was then a deeply classified operation within the CIA, the ~​~~​~~​~~​~ Program. The work would demand intense concentration over long hours, so each team—and I was in the first team created—would only work in the ~​~~​~~​~~​~ ~​~~​~~​~~ for four months. At this point, I had friends at work, pals I’d go to lunch with or go out with on the weekends, and even a boyfriend in the agency, an operative who reminded me of a living G.I. Joe. But I couldn’t tell any of them about the ~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~. I couldn’t even tell my boss, though he was the only one in my division who knew I was leaving for another department. I hadn’t changed offices yet, so for the past few days I’d been straddling the two worlds, reporting to two different bosses and sitting in the same cubicle where I’d been all year.

  The song ended, and I cut the engine. I took my flip phone out of my purse and opened the glovebox. My flexible Velcro back brace was jammed in there. A few months earlier, I’d had increasing pain up my spine that made every breath feel like it was directing a team of knives to make sliver-thin cuts down the length of my body. I ignored the pain the best I could until the day I could barely stand but forced myself in to work anyway.
I ended up on the floor unable to move. A trip to the hospital revealed bony overgrowths on my vertebrae, pressing in on my spinal nerves. The only solution was surgery, where they had shaved off the overgrowths, creating space and relieving the pressure. After a month of recovery, I felt fine but still kept the brace nearby in case I was stuck in traffic and found it hard to sit, trapped in the car.

  I shoved my phone into the glovebox, beneath the brace. Cell phones were confiscated by security if you tried to enter the building with one. Before I got out of the car, I flipped down the visor and looked at myself. I liked my outfit that day. It was new. Fresh. A blue button-down with a blue pencil skirt, both from J. Crew. On my feet were nude peep-toe pumps that pinched my toes but seemed worth it for the overall look. I took my pink lipstick from my purse and reapplied it. The meeting I’d had with the ~​~~​~~​~~​~ ~​~~​~~​~~ team just a few days ago was running in my head. There had been the seven of us who had been selected for the program and our immediate supervisor. At twenty-two, I was the youngest person on the team. I was also the only woman. The men had a confidence that made them seem much older than me; most of them were in their thirties, though some hadn’t quite hit thirty yet. Our supervisor was a tall, thin Hispanic man who wore a long tie that he tucked into the top of his pants. We all called each other by our first names, and I’d called my boss in mapping by his first name. But this boss seemed stern, mature, and I wasn’t sure if I should call him by his first name or not. So I didn’t use any name, though in my head I called him by his first name, Anton.

  Anton explained that we’d be watching the terrorists and the training camps from a place I called The Vault. ~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~ After learning all we needed to know about the program, I had asked, “So, what are the chances we will need to use this?”